Why Is Goal Setting Important For Inbound Marketing?

There was a time when those applying content marketing and inbound marketing strategies struggled to demonstrate their ROI. 

But times have changed. According to HubSpot's 2020 State of Inbound report, 91% of marketers are confident that what they do directly contributes to increased revenues for their business.

They know because they can see the numbers. They are meeting the goals that matter to their business, like increasing revenues and shortening sales cycles. But to reach those big goals, you have to understand the goals you achieve long before revenue generation. These allow you to meet the big business goals and help you do it more efficiently and cost-effectively.

For a more thorough overview of inbound marketing, visit Everything You Need To Know About Inbound Marketing. This article covers a lot more topics and how you should use them in your business.

Benefits of Setting Inbound Marketing Goals

Helps You Focus Your Inbound Marketing Efforts

Let's create videos. Let's start a blog. Let's share curated content on social media.

When you start inbound marketing, it's easy to get a little excited about the possibilities to delight your customers with helpful content. There are so many "activities" that fall under the inbound marketing umbrella. But you don't need to do all of them at once. And every inbound method won't work for every business. 

So it's vital that you understand exactly how each activity contributes to success.

When you have clear inbound marketing goals, as recommended by HubSpot, you can streamline your inbound activities to focus on the ones that most efficiently help you meet goals.

Gives You Guard Rails For Your Content

When your inbound marketing team has clear guidance, they can work magic, achieving goals more efficiently and thoroughly. But without goals, things can quickly get out of hand. 

Creativity can be an amazing tool to attract and engage in inbound. It's welcomed and celebrated. But without guardrails, creativity can go off-track fast. Unbridled, it can waste time and money with little to show for the effort.

Inbound marketing goals ensure everyone knows what you're trying to achieve as a brand. You funnel every idea and every project through the goal. If it doesn't align, then no matter how creative that idea is, it's not a good fit for the brand right now.

Creates Alignment Among Your Marketing, Sales, And Services Teams

A disconnect between these three will become a big problem for your business. Marketing, sales, and services are interdependent on each other in so many ways.

If marketing doesn't send sales highly qualified leads, they can't close the deals. If services don't live up to the brand image being promoted by sales and marketing, a company is seen as disingenuous. If sales doesn't understand the types of leads that marketing sends then and can't close them, and it can look like marketing is not generating sales qualified leads (SQL).

That's frustrating for everyone!

Inbound marketing goals create transparency. Marketing, sales, and services can see the whole picture, understand how their team objectives connect to larger interconnected goals, and achieve the best results separately and together.

Helps You Measure The Success Of Your Inbound Marketing Efforts

If you don't benchmark, you won't be able to see how you've grown. How is inbound marketing contributing to your increased revenues? What can you do more to improve further your ability to meet the business goals that matter most, like increasing revenues, reducing the sales cycle, and increasing profits?

Understand exactly how inbound activities translate to revenues and profits by setting clear goals.

How To Set Goals

Assess Your Current Marketing

Maybe you're completely new to the idea of HubSpot inbound marketing, so you've been using traditional methods like TV ads, billboards, flyers, and radio. Or you may have switched to online marketing using tools like Google AdWords or Facebook ad manager. It's also possible that you've heard about inbound marketing and are trying to implement it. As of 2017, HubSpot research found that 76% of marketers had switched to at least some inbound approaches.

So evaluate your current methods and the goals you achieve from them. Are you...

• Reaching your target audience
• Able to convert the audience into qualified leads
• Able to close leads in a timely manner
• Growing or doing a lot of "wheel-spinning"
• Spending too much and getting too little in return

Determine Where You Want to Be

Now that you know what isn't working, where do you see yourself in six months, a year, five years? Start with an end result like revenues and work your way back. For starters, if are a small services business and you want to generate $20,000 a month, you need to know:

• What is a customer's lifetime value?
• What is your average order value?
• What percentage of leads become paying customers?
• What percentage of people you attract to your website become leads?

Now, how many people do you need to attract each month? How many leads do you need to generate from that? And so on.

And the great thing about inbound marketing is that it will increase your average order size, shorten the sales cycle, improve the conversion rate, and increase promoter activity over time. As these rates go up, you can do more with fewer leads and visitors. This is when business growth can really take off.

Set Achievable Goals

Hubspot inbound marketing is a proven methodology for increasing qualified leads by magnetizing your brand among your most likely customers. It can help you achieve great things. But to get the best results in the least amount of time, it's essential that you stay focused.

So set smaller, more achievable goals. If you're unsure about what an achievable goal looks like, try this.

Create a moderate goal and a stretch goal. You now have a window of achievement. Your team should push to meet that moderate goal, but reward them with something extra if they can reach the stretch goal.

Communicating Goals With Your Team

It's vital that everyone understand their role. A successful marketing team will make sales roles easier. When a service team meets its goals, marketing can promote quality and service without focusing so much on managing bad publicity. When sales are closing deals, everyone wins because they just turned everyone's hard work into tangible revenues.

While each team has their own objectives, they're all working together to achieve big central goals. They need to know this. It needs to become a part of the culture to see each other as a valuable piece of the whole. Each team member is instrumental in the success of others as others are instrumental in their success.

When every team knows what you're trying to achieve as a whole brand and each team has clearly defined goals for their part in achieving that whole brand goal, they work together to achieve more.

Measuring Success

Re-evaluate your goals every three to six months in that first year of magnetizing your brand. If you're blowing certain goals out of the water, it's time to adjust the goal. If you meet your stretch goals by a little, but consistently, it's time to re-set your sites a little higher.

As the customer-focused methodology inbounding marketing becomes a part of your culture and success, grow and expand to reach and delight new customers.